


could never have lived, after loving you

by HereComeDatBoi



Series: you're the one that's making me strong [23]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adashi are good uncles, Domestic Bliss, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Married Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Mild Angst, Parenthood, adashi babies, klance are forever mentioned as being married but never actually show up lol, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 19:04:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21361159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: Shiro had never loved Adamnormally.What was normal, anyway?
Relationships: Adam/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: you're the one that's making me strong [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1261916
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	could never have lived, after loving you

**Author's Note:**

> guess who's back,  
back again
> 
> .
> 
> ,
> 
> not Heaven, On His Shoulders, that's for sure *flees*

Shiro had never loved Adam  _ normally.  _

He realized this on a winter morning twelve years after the war, in the middle of a garden washing-day with Keith and Lance’s youngest son wriggling under his arm. He was scrubbing a load of laundry with one hand and trying to keep Sebastián from falling into the river with the other, and when he glanced up and saw Adam shelling peas on the porch he wondered if his love for his husband had ever been anything but  _ different _ , somehow. When they met (nearly twenty-six years ago, now) Shiro had been deaf and blind to the world at large, rarely stopping to marvel at anything about it until a gangly farm boy bumped into him in the hallway and shook up a lifetime’s worth of perspective--made it broader and brighter and warmer, until all of the universe looked lovely to him simply because Adam lived in it. 

Shiro had known no greater joy than loving him and receiving his love in return, and nothing would ever come close to convincing him otherwise. 

“Unca Shiro,” Sebastián grumbled, digging his chubby toes into the grass and trying to squirm out of Shiro’s hold. “I just wanna put my  _ feet  _ in the water. Please?”

“No, you may not,” said Shiro absently, plopping the toddler into an empty wash-tub and tucking a stack of clean blankets over his legs. “It isn’t safe, Seb, especially if no one’s keeping an eye on you. If you want to swim, you can do it later in the bathtub.”

“No fair,” pouted Sebastian. “Uncle Adam—”

“No, Sebby,” Adam called from his perch on the doorstep. “I’m busy, and Uncle ‘Kashi’s busy, and Sonia and Himeko are away at school, so you’ll have to wait until they come home.”

“But I wanna splash  _ now. _ ”

“Patience yields focus, young Kogane,” Shiro told him. “Why don’t you go make mud pies with Mari and Kira? Or play in the pillow castle with the twins?”

“Don’t want to. I’m mad.”

Adam stifled a smile and came over to sit beside them, bundling Sebby into his lap and kissing the top of his head. “Why would you want to be mad on a day like this,  _ baba?  _ The sun’s out, and you can play wherever you like that’s  _ not  _ dangerous, and Uncle Kashi’s going to make a strawberry pie as soon as he finishes the laundry.”

“I’m mad ‘cause Dad and Papá left me and took  _ Kazha  _ to Arus to see Auntie Allura,” Sebastian sulked. “And I  _ miss  _ them.”

“Oh, Seb, they didn’t  _ leave  _ you. Kazha’s starting his training with the Blades, remember? Your dads need to make sure everything at the base is ready and set up for him and then go with him to his lessons for the first few days, and they wouldn’t want you to be lonely on that big station while they were off doing boring school things. They’ll take you when you’re old enough, right? Your Papá promised you. Remember you made him write it down and then got Uncle Adam to read it to you?”

“But then I’ll miss Kazha when they come back,” Sebby protested tearily, seemingly determined to be distraught about  _ something.  _ “And then I won’t have his fur to hold when I get nightmares! It’s not  _ fair. _ ”

“You’d better go in and get that pie going, love,” Adam whispered, giving Shiro’s hand a squeeze before turning back to their sniffling nephew. “I’ll take care of this.”

Shiro nodded and went back into the house, leaving his metal arm behind to finish the last of the laundry as he ransacked the cupboards for flour and sugar. Food tended to disappear faster than they could buy it, most days, and what with the chaos of running after four nieces and nephews as well as four daughters neither he nor Adam had had time to drive to the grocery store. There were always plenty of fruits and vegetables, and plenty of milk and eggs--Shiro only had to step outdoors to find these, whether to the produce fields or the pasture near the orchard where Adam had set up a pen for the cows and a gated run for the hens. But rice and flour and bread and sugar never lasted long, and it took him nearly ten minutes to find an unopened pack of Arrowhead in the spice cupboard. 

As he measured out flour and mixed it with butter, he thought of Sebby’s little troubles and how Adam used to soothe away his own worries when they were younger--so calmly and gently that Shiro started feeling better before he finished explaining what was wrong, even during the first days after his diagnosis when the world seemed to have been turned on its head and shattered into pieces all at once. 

_ “You’ll be okay,”  _ Adam had whispered, curled up into a long-legged ball at the bottom of Shiro’s hospital with his feet sticking out over the floor.  _ “I know this is bad, moonlight. But you’ll be okay. You have to be.” _

He hadn’t really thought about what  _ okay  _ meant, at the time. He’d probably assumed that it meant he would recover and get his old life back again, but now he realized that Adam probably meant to say that he would be able to live fully and happily no matter what happened--that if there was a new, more limited normal he had no choice but to accept, he  _ would  _ be able to thrive in it, and that he would have Adam’s support every step of the way. After all, they knew the dystropy would be fatal, eventually--the key word being eventually, since the medication regimen Shiro had been prescribed would have let him keep enough of his muscle mass to live independently well into his forties, and there was plenty of time for everything he wanted between the month he started taking it and the day it finally stopped working. 

Over twenty years’ worth of time, which Shiro decided to devote to off-planet missions despite the fact that they accelerated his muscle breakdown and made everything worse. 

And then there was Voltron, and the war--his recovery after being put into a new body, his reunion with Adam and the war’s end. 

And after that was the wrenching memory of the night Adam died, which could still turn a day into a waking nightmare just by the slightest reference to it. 

“I’ve never loved you in a normal way, sweetheart,” Shiro whispered, reaching for the tub of freshly-rinsed apples draining in the kitchen sink. “Some people can move on after love, and marriage, but I could never have moved on after you. I could only have hoped I’d join you someday, and shut myself up in our old apartment until you came back to take me with you. I don’t think I ever really lived before I met you, and if I’d lost you for good that time I could never have lived again.”

_ Oh, darling. I could never have lived after loving you either, ‘Kashi. You know that.  _

He laughed wetly and picked up a knife, glancing out the window to where Adam was trying to coax the twins out of the mango tree. Amla had a green mango stuck in her mouth, and Adam was torn between laughing and scolding as he grabbed her legs and started pulling her down. 

“I know, sweetheart. I know.”


End file.
